Belles on their Toes

things for the rest of the night, and don't you let anybody else take you off the dance floor."

    Mother was asleep when Jane and the boys returned home from the dance, but she heard them and came down in her bathrobe to help them raid the icebox. Jane wasn't upset any more, and she told Mother with considerable detail about the rush she had had.
    "You're lucky to have so many brothers to help you get started," Mother said, looking proudly at the boys. "You boys have been mighty sweet to her."
    "I'll say," Jane agreed excitedly. "And what do you think, Mother, tonight they're going to teach me about kissing."
    "I think that's fine," said Mother, "and it's not every girl... They're going to teach you about what?" she shouted.
    "About kissing," said Jane.
    "I won't have it," Mother announced flatly. "I try to be modern. I didn't say a word when you were showing her about hand-squeezes and things like that—things most girls don't know until they're in their twenties." She raised her voice again. "But I won't have any lessons in that. The very idea!"
    It took a little explaining to get across the notion that the boys were planning to teach Jane how not to be kissed. And after Mother had heard what had happened at the dance, she agreed that the instruction wasn't taking place a minute too soon.
    She poured herself a glass of milk, while Fred fixed her a peanut butter sandwich, and she got plates and cut apple cake for everyone. Then, after poking around self-consciously as if he wasn't sure but what Tom would return unexpectedly from the hospital, she perched on his table.
    "School's in session," she declared.
    The boys asked Jane how and where it happened.
    "We were dancing, and he asked me how I'd like to go out on the porch and look at the moon," she said. "I squeezed his hand, like you showed me, and said I wouldn't mind."
    "No wonder you got kissed, you sap you," Dan moaned. "What did you do that for?"
    "You told me to," Jane replied angrily. "Don't try to put the blame on me. You said I should try to make all of them like me. How was I supposed to know he didn't want to look at the moon?"
    "Jane's right," Mother agreed. "It's not her fault,"
    The boys said that from now on Jane was supposed to shun parked cars and porches, and was to view with suspicion any conversation about planets, satellites, constellations, or the need for a breath of fresh air. They showed her, too, how to sit far over on her own side of the car, coming home from a date, and how to lean forward, or twist around so her back was to the door, if anyone tried to put his arm around her shoulder.
    "No if a boy kisses you anyway," said Jack, "the best squelch you can give him is to act like a dummy. The kiss doesn't affect you one way or the other. You're bored with the whole business."
    "That usually gives them the idea," Bob agreed. "If it doesn't, you can wipe your lips with the back of your hand, and look as if there's something there that their best friend ought to tell them."
    "Never slap them," said Fred. "A slap just makes them mad. And they still don't know whether you really object to being kissed, or whether you're just playing hard-to-get."
    "You boys," said Mother, disapprovingly, "seem to know a great deal about it. Where'd you find out about things like that?"
    "It's information," Fred grinned, "that's handed down from father to son."

    Tom died a few months later, convinced that pleurisy was the old enemy that finally had laid him low. While he was at the hospital, some of us went to see him almost every day. Sometimes he'd beg to be taken home, where he felt sure he could cure himself in a few days with his Quinine Remedy. But the doctors wouldn't allow him to be moved.
    On several occasions we smuggled bottles of the Remedy into the hospital, hoping that his faith in its curative powers might make him well again. It didn't seem to affect him, one way or the other.
    Tom always had been suspicious of hospitals. He had often told us his belief that doctors sometimes gave the "black bottle"—poison—to patients who didn't have plenty of money.
    Toward the end, when he recognized us less frequently, he refused to take any medicines, even the Remedy.
    It could be said that Tom was a man who never amounted to much. By some standards, perhaps he wasn't even a very good man. He swore a good deal, and in later years he drank more than he should have. But the day he died, twelve people wept for him.
    That number may be more than par for